Mr. Broad of Wall Street

This Sunday strip by McManus follows a stock-market speculator through four panels of escalating comic trouble. The protagonist's plan to phone his sweetheart and attend to business unravels when he encounters a woman hawking theater tickets, then stumbles into a movie house where he spots an advertisement for "Fifi Thistletoe—50 Girls—Cutie." The final panel reveals his wife waiting ominously in the orchestra pit. McManus employs the visual conventions established by newspaper comics: sequential panels with speech balloons, a recurring character facing domestic predicament, and slapstick movement that builds comedic momentum. The strip exemplifies how daily and Sunday newspaper comics of the 1920s developed the narrative and graphic language that would define the medium—discrete panels, timing through layout, and the running gag of marital conflict that anchored countless strips of the era.